Wednesday, July 2, 2008

The downside to using Flickr photos on the Nelso home page

I went to the home page of Nelso.com earlier today, and was greeted with the page you see in the screenshot below (click the image to enlarge). Yes, that is exactly who you think it is looking out the window of Prague Castle at the city of Prague below.

How did this happen? Well, it's a result of the "interestingness" algorithm of Flickr. To place random images of a place on the Nelso city home pages, I make a call to Flickr for photos tagged with that place name and then sorted by "interestingness". Usually, this works very well, and returns great photos of Prague 8, or Berlin, etc. Unfortunately, it sometimes returns photos like the one of the very bad man that made it onto the home page of Nelso.com.